Sovereign AI invests in OLIX: One of Britain's newest unicorns. Aug 3, 2026 Artificial intelligence is advancing at an extraordinary pace. But behind every breakthrough in AI is a physical challenge: the infrastructure powering these systems must become dramatically more efficient if it is to support increasingly capable models at global scale. Today, we're announcing our investment in OLIX, a UK company building a fundamentally new approach to AI inference infrastructure. As AI systems become increasingly agenticand reasoning-intensive, inference - the stage where trained models generate responses, make decisions and perform real-world tasks - is becoming one of the defining engineering challenges of the AI era. The question is no longer simply how to build better chips, but how to rethink the systems that produce AI at scale. What makes OLIX particularly distinctive is that it isn't just building a new chip. The company is designing almost everypart of the system itself - from the chips and the technology that connects them, to the software that coordinates them. This level of vertical integration is unusual in AI hardware and is made possible by the UK's exceptional strengths in semiconductor engineering, photonics, and research. Companies like OLIX are showing how those strengths can come together to build globally significant AI infrastructure businesses. With engineering teams in both London and Bristol, OLIX is drawing on talent from across the UK's deep technology ecosystem to solve some of the biggest engineering challenges facing AI. Founded in 2024 by James Dacombe, OLIX has rapidly become one of Europe's most ambitious deep technology companies. Before founding OLIX, James established neurotechnology company CoMind. Earlier this year, at just 25 years old, James and the OLIX team announced a $220 million Series A - one of the largest Series A rounds ever raised by a UK technology company. That raise propelled OLIX to unicorn statusless than two years after it was founded, reflecting both the scale of the company's ambition and the confidence that some of the world's leading technology investors have placed in James, his team and their vision for thefuture of AI infrastructure. Josephine Kant, Head of Ventures at Sovereign AI, said: "I left my first meeting with James convinced he'd be one of the most important founders of his generation. OLIX is completely rethinking what AI infrastructure should look like from first principles, and doing it from the UK. The company is two years old and already one of the most ambitious hardware businesses in Britain. James not only wants to win globally, but he's also proud of where he's from. You can see both in the name he chose for his holding company: Bletchley Industries."

UK AI chip startup OLIX secures £232M in Series B funding. Thom Carter 03 August 2026, 03.49pm OLIX, the UK-based AI hardware company founded in 2024, has secured $312 million (£232m) in its Series B round and also achieved a $3.3 billion (£2.45bn) valuation. The startup is developing the next-generation of AI chips that are faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient than current AI chips. Known as "inference chips," these are being designed specifically with AI in mind, with each specialising in a particular part of an AI model's "thinking" process. The financing funds the route to delivering its DX-1 chip, which is designed for the stage at which an AI model reasons and generates its output, to OLIX's first customers by the second half of 2027. Further, the investment will go towards the build-out of the wider custom silicon platform behind it, with the manufacturing and supply chain commitments that frontier inference hardware requires. OLIX's latest round of funding included investors such as Arm, Hudson River Trading, Fundomo, the UK Government's Sovereign AI venture fund, Reed Hastings - the co-founder of Netflix - as well as existing investors all increasing their commitments. Speaking on the startup and why the UK Government invested in it through the Sovereign AI fund, AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said: "The future of AI will be built on chips that power models. Countries that build chips will build leverage. "OLIX is exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI. In just two years, it has established itself as one of the UK's most exciting AI startups, developing breakthrough chip technology with the potential to help shape the future of AI. "If we want Britain to lead in AI, we need to back the technologies that sit underneath it. That's how we'll attract investment, create high-skilled jobs and ensure the UK remains a country that builds the future of AI, not just uses it." Recommended reading. On top of the new funding and valuation, the startup also confirmed today that it has appointed Matt Briers, who was CFO of Wise for nine years, as the company's Chief Financial Officer. Additionally, Professor Nick McKeown - cited as a defining figure of modern networking, and co-inventor of software-defined networking, OpenFlow, and P4 - has been appointed to its board of directors.

UK chip startup OLIX lands $312m to scale frontier inference. The latest funding supports OLIX's AI chip development and expands its leadership with appointments to the board and CFO. OLIX, a UK-based semiconductor and AI chip startup founded in 2024, has secured $312m in a Series B funding round, at a valuation of $3.3bn. The fundraising saw participation from Arm, Fundomo, Hudson River Trading, and individual investors such as Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. Existing investors Plural, Hummingbird Ventures, Phoenix Court, Crane, Creandum and Transition all expanded their commitments in OLIX during this round. OLIX develops infrastructure for frontier AI inference. The company designs its systems end to end, including the chips, lasers, and the network that connects them. It delivers these systems as complete racks for high-demand inference workloads. According to OLIX, current approaches to building AI inference hardware are constrained by efficiency limits. The firm contends that large data centres, which process tokens for AI models, generally use general-purpose chips throughout, instead of deploying specialised hardware for each stage of computation. OLIX has developed the X-1 platform, which unrolls AI models across multiple chips, assigning each chip to focus on a single computational stage. Each chip is also designed to remain flexible, without hardcoded model architectures. The system features a newly designed "slow and wide" optical interconnect, transferring data between chips using light rather than copper, which OLIX says brings lower latency and energy costs. The firm's first chip, DX-1, is tailored as a decode accelerator for the output stage of large AI models, especially those with 100 billion parameters. OLIX says DX-1 delivers over 10,000 tokens per second per user, with higher throughput per watt than general-purpose chips, and that its design omits advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory to help avoid supply chain bottlenecks. Funds from the Series B will be used to complete DX-1 and expand OLIX's custom silicon platform, aiming for initial customer access in the second half of 2027. The company is recruiting staff for roles in silicon, compiler, photonics, and systems engineering across London, Austin, Bristol, Toronto, and San Francisco. In February, OLIX secured $220m in Series A funding round to support the development of AI chips. The funding round, led by Hummingbird Ventures, valued OLIX at $1bn. As part of the latest Series B funding announcement, OLIX has added Professor Nick McKeown to its board of directors. McKeown is known for his work co-inventing software-defined networking, OpenFlow and P4. He currently holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and is the 2025 Marconi Prize recipient. McKeown previously co-founded businesses including Nicira, which was acquired by VMware, and Barefoot Networks, which was purchased by Intel. OLIX has also announced the appointment of Matt Briers as chief financial officer (CFO), who previously spent nine years in the same position at UK-based fintech company Wise. Give your business an edge with its leading Tech Monitor